The Sustainable Hurricane Season Plan

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While I’ve lived on the Gulf Coast for just a little over 10 years, I’ve already endured a more-than-fair share of hurricanes: Georges, Ivan, Dennis, Katrina, Wilma.

I’ve been more fortunate than many, but my post-hurricane experiences have actually raised my awareness a great deal about the importance of sustainability. Because few things make you understand the challenges of sustainable living more than a few days or weeks in a disaster zone with no electricity, no drinkable running water, no passable roads.

And so, with another hurricane season once again looming (it starts June 1), here are some of the sustainability lessons I’ve learned over the years:
First, small-scale solar rocks. A week without electricity and nighttime lighting stinks. (As one Katrina survivor in New Orleans put it, you never realize how dark the night is until all the lights go out.) A week spent burning up package after package of D-cell batteries to keep the flashlights on is no picnic either. But a house illuminated by solar-powered yard lanterns can be not only navigable but pretty darned cozy.

Lesson One: Invest in some good-quality solar landscape lights that can easily be carried indoors to provide lighting post-hurricane.

Next, when all else fails, you can always rely on muscle power. After Dennis, the skies cleared and the sun was shining again in Northwest Florida after a mere four or five hours. After Georges, though, the rain lingered for a week, entombing our house in gloom. The solar solution for indoor lighting wasn’t an option then, but hand-cranked flashlights and lanterns were.

Lesson Two: Stash away at least a few hand-cranked lights as a backup if the sun doesn’t cooperate with your solar plans.

Another casualty of no electricity is all the food in your refrigerator and freezer. Plus, you can’t cook indoors if you rely on electricity rather than gas. Lots of hurricane zone veterans keep their outdoor grills ready to fire up to cook up their food before it spoils, but what do you do when the propane runs out? Which it often does.

SolarCooking.org has the answer: build your own solar cooker. It can be as easy to make as curling a reflective auto sunshade into a funnel, placing the funnel in a box and keeping the focused sunlight aimed at a black pot of food in the funnel. Cooler still: did you know a solar cooker can pasteurize water and even chill food and water at night?

Lesson Three: Print out a plan for building a solar cooker and keep it in your hurricane kit. It’s one more way to avoid the need to eat cold ravioli from a can at lunchtime.

While battery-, solar- and hand-powered gadgets can make life more comfortable after a storm, low-tech is sometimes best. And Nigerian Mohammed Bah Abba won a prestigious Rolex award for his low-tech way of preserving food: the pot-in-pot cooling system, also known as the “desert refrigerator.” The idea couldn’t be simpler: fit one clay pot into a larger pot, keeping the space between the two filled with wet sand. Cover the top with a damp cloth, and evaporative cooling does the rest. In one of Abba’s tests, the pot-in-pot system kept eggplant fresh for 27 days instead of three.

Lesson Four: Keep a couple of clay pots or bowls handy. The system won’t keep meat and dairy cool enough, but you can at least preserve the tomatoes and grapes that would otherwise spoil in your powerless fridge.

Finally, any hurricane veteran will tell you it is hot, hot, hot after a storm and generator-run air-conditioning isn’t an option for many. If you know a bit about passive cooling, you can make life a little more pleasant.

Lesson Five: Make yourself some shade-cloth curtains now and keep them ready to hang. And look for any other passive cooling solutions that might work for you, print out the instructions now and keep the necessary supplies on hand for when you need them.